Physical computers, also known as physical machines, face a myriad of threats to their smooth and continuous operation, including threats to the data stored in storages of the physical machines. A storage is computer-readable media capable of storing data. In order to mitigate these threats, a backup of the data in a storage may be created at a particular point in time to enable the restoration of the data at some future time. Such a restoration may become desirable, for example, if the storage experiences corruption of its stored data, if the storage becomes unavailable, or if a user wishes to create a second identical storage.
When a user desires to restore the storage of a physical machine from a backup, the restoration to a storage on a new physical machine can involve a number of challenges, including taking an unacceptable amount of time. In order to shorten the amount of time it takes to restore the storage of a physical machine from a backup, a user may restore the backup to a virtual storage on a virtual machine.
A virtual machine is a software-based emulation of a physical machine in a process generally known as virtualization. A virtual machine generally operates based on the computer architecture and functions of a physical machine. A hypervisor is computer software, computer firmware, or computer hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is generally referred to as a host machine, while each virtual machine running on the hypervisor is generally referred to as a guest virtual machine. A hypervisor generally creates a guest virtual machine by accessing a disk file that is bootable by the hypervisor and that contains or references data that is used to create the guest virtual machine. The hypervisor also generally presents the guest virtual machine with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of an operating system of the guest virtual machine.
One common problem encountered when utilizing a hypervisor is that some hypervisors are only designed to access disk files that have a particular file format that is native to the hypervisor. For example, Microsoft Hyper-V® hypervisors are designed to only be capable of accessing disk files having the VHD and VHDX file formats, which are the native file formats for Microsoft® Hyper-V® hypervisors, for the purpose of creating a guest virtual machine. In particular, Microsoft Hyper-V® technology lacks disk plugin application programming interfaces (APIs) which are necessary to enable third parties to quickly attach disk data from their own disk image formats into Microsoft® Hyper-V® hypervisors for access by virtual machines. This inability of some hypervisors to access a variety of differently-formatted disk files, due to a lack of disk plugin APIs for example, limits the disk files that can be used to create virtual machines using these hypervisors.
Another common problem encountered when utilizing a hypervisor is that often the hardware configuration emulated by a hypervisor is different from the hardware configuration of an operating system stored in a backup. Therefore, when the backup is restored to a virtual storage on a virtual machine, the hardware configuration of the restored operating system may be incompatible with the hardware configuration of the virtual machine, making it difficult or impossible to boot the operating system in the virtual machine. Further, the backup may also be missing disk-centric data that is used in booting the operating system due to the backup only including data from a portion of a disk, such as a partition or a volume of the disk, which may also make it difficult or impossible to boot the operating system in the virtual machine.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one example technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.